![]() Until Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were taken in for questioning on the Thursday morning, no one imagined that the killers would be as young as 10. The surveillance images convinced the police that they were looking for two teenagers. That was Sunday, February 14, Valentine's Day. The two-year-old child had been attacked with bricks and an iron bar, then laid across the tracks to make it look like an accident. ![]() Two days later a body was found on a railway line. A shopping-centre surveillance camera had caught two shadowy figures leading away a smaller figure, his hand placed trustingly in theirs. What put it on the front page was an image. And had the child, following the usual pattern, been killed by someone he knew - a father, stepfather, uncle, neighbour or family friend - the story would have rated only a passing mention. But for the first few hours after James Bulger went missing, it was assumed that the abductor was an adult. It came to symbolise a moral panic about children - the threat of other people's, the defencelessness of our own. The BBC called it a "landmark case", and so it was.
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